


hand covers bruise (reprise)

by forsanethaec



Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Angst, Depositions, Dom/sub Undertones, M/M, Rough Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-14
Updated: 2012-08-14
Packaged: 2017-11-12 02:48:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/485820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forsanethaec/pseuds/forsanethaec
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Get it all on the record,” she says, “and pay him. Balance your literal and figurative ledgers. In the scheme of things, it’s a speeding ticket.” (Canon AU in which the lawsuit is a formality that takes place after M&E have reconciled and gotten together post-dilution.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	hand covers bruise (reprise)

**Author's Note:**

> Not OTP-friendly. Like at all. Like if fix-it is a genre, this is break-it. Please don't read if that's not your cup of tea.
> 
> Huge thanks to Julia and Maddy for the beta work. All remaining errors are my own.
> 
> ETA: Now with a beautiful accompanying [fanmix](http://my-ownremedy.livejournal.com/6118.html)!

> _Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud._
> 
> \- Richard Siken, “Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out”

 

The things Mark hangs onto will be from before, in the end, collected like Polaroids in a shoebox: Eduardo’s suit jackets hanging in the closet, his thin ankles crossed in Mark’s lap on the couch with SportsCenter droning in the background, the soft curve of his mouth as he laughed against the neck of a beer, his eyes crinkling at the corners. Two cereal bowls in the sink and the downy depression of a body on both sides of the bed. Mark can pretend, if he concentrates, that this is where they left it, where they remain, preserved. Like a taxidermied diorama behind smudged glass: him and Eduardo, a year or so of tenuous happiness, good choices, the right words.

That's the snapshot, poised just before the inevitable swan dive. Like you'd never know to look at them they ever took it.

 

i. 

“No, no, let me make sure I understand,” Mark interrupts the woman from legal, who’s sitting across his desk from him in a pencil skirt and four-inch heels with her hands folded patiently in her lap. “You want to fight completely innocuous, one-off press -- actually, not press, _Valleywag_ , Jesus -- by generating far worse press at a cost of copious amounts of everybody’s time, money and sanity. Is that right? That's what we're talking about here? ” 

“No.” She holds his gaze. “We want to head off the resurfacing of unpleasant and potentially damaging company history with a logical concession that will make everyone -- that’s you, the company _and_ Mr. Saverin -- look good.”

“He doesn’t work here.”

“And that's precisely why he threatened to sue you himself two years ago. I'm just telling you what his lawyers will tell him. Going ahead with that suit, you both come out made whole."

"What does that mean?"

"It means either restitution or the suitably controlled closing of books that shouldn't still be open," she says, "depending whose side of the table you're on. Also,” and here she smiles drily, “the cost you mentioned would be in your money, not everyone’s.” 

God, Mark hates these people. She’s pretty, he thinks observationally, this one -- Mary? Marian? Marla? -- and she exudes the annoying kind of competence where it’s slightly more self-satisfied than it is boring but it’s also impossible to argue with. Like a more restrained version of Mark’s, come to think of it. How unfortunate. 

She’s only in his office in the first place is because he and Eduardo were spotted out together, drinking downtown with Dustin and some of the old programmers on the occasion of 10 million members, or because they were spotted leaving the bar together, or maybe because they were spotted doing some unwise things in the shadow of an alley down the street. And Mark would usually say fuck it and let Valleywag run with whatever it wanted, but it’s still a tricky thing, him and Eduardo, even after several months. 

Eduardo works at an investments firm in San Mateo now, and he tries to act like it wasn’t Mark who lured him back to the States after he’d spent the better part of his first year post-grad in Singapore. The truth is, Mark had never given up on him after the dilution. The first apology had come early, before school had even ended, and they’d managed to keep talking, and it had been all but a done deal by the time Mark told him, “I want you back here.” Mark had known that this was how it would work. He’d known that his candor was one of the things Eduardo liked best about him, and that persistent attention paid to Eduardo, to _them_ , was one of the things that had always been lacking the most.

And it wasn’t such a hardship, missing Eduardo. Nor was it recognizing that while there were two sides to the story, undeniably, on certain levels, he’d fucked up. That was evident if nowhere else in the fact that one day Mark had had Eduardo by his side, and the next day he hadn’t, and one of those was clearly the correct way for the world to function. So they made amends. 

The love came later, crept up on him a little more than the rest of it, and it started as a quick fix, an instinctive thing, early on: a drizzly spring night, Eduardo unsure on the phone from his sublet, telling Mark that he didn’t know if he could be here, that he was watching himself fall right back into something he’d sworn he’d never fall back into -- and Mark had rolled his eyes and hung up the phone and driven over, his tires sluicing on the wet macadam, and when Eduardo had opened the door Mark had stepped inside and gone, “That was a cry for help, right?” and Eduardo had kissed him. And for just a moment it had been _convince me to stay_ and then it had become _this is why I came back_ and a month later they were living together, because it was obvious, so immediately, that this was the way things always should have been. 

(Of course everything about their fragile reconciliation is a band-aid, really, for injuries that would be better served by stitches. But those band-aids get close into the skin, grow more solid over time; they help with the healing. Mark thinks of them as grafts, like strips of papier-mâché. A reconstruction of the best of what they’d used to be, setting, slowly, into permanence.)

In any case, they’ve been trying to keep a low profile, because Eduardo doesn’t want people to “get the wrong idea” and because they’ve both had enough of scandal for a while. This is why the idea that this woman is proposing, soon after Gawker runs a grainy cell phone picture alongside some unsavory conjectures to the effect of “deposed Facebook co-founder spotted in Palo Alto getting, _ahem_ , back into Zuckerberg’s good graces,” strikes Mark as ironic to the point of absurdity. 

He is, apparently, alone in this conviction. _Lawyers_ , he thinks, and he grinds his teeth.

“Right now, in the press," she says, her tone suggesting that she's doing him a sincere, selfless personal favor, "Eduardo looks like an idiot who can’t stay away from a bad thing. And you,” she pronounces delicately, “look like a bad thing.”

“Can’t I just write a check,” he says through a clenched jaw.

“We’ll do it all as minimally as possible. Depositions, get the story down, then settle. Easy. You become something resembling the good guy and, more importantly, we look like a company that pays its dues.” 

“I think we look like a company that bends over for anyone who asks.” 

“You don’t need to play hardball here, Mark. With acquisitions, things like that, maybe. There’s a time and a place. But Facebook is a people’s company. Your service is a people’s service. _Act_ like people.” She spreads her hands. “Simplest way I can put it. And when you do something down the road that pisses off your customers -- and you will -- it'll make it that much harder for them to write you off.” 

He regards her for a moment with his iciest lizard stare, but she doesn’t blink, and finally he’s forced to look away.

“Okay,” he says, scowling. “Say I agree to this -- which I haven't -- what do Wardo’s people say?”

“I already talked to them,” she says smoothly. He bristles, but she goes on, “It’s a win-win. He looks like he can do business like an adult, get what’s owed to him, et cetera. Not just bend over, as you say,” she adds with a quirk of one eyebrow, which he ignores. 

“We’re letting him win,” he says, voice shriveling, more petulant than he intends for it to be. He frowns, entirely irked by this situation. 

“Mark, respectfully,” and her voice softens a little, “you need to do this. For the company, and for yourself, and for your boyfriend."

Mark opens his mouth, but she lifts her hands, gentle yet firm with palms out, the universal gesture for _stop._

“Get it all on the record,” she says, “and pay him. Balance your literal and figurative ledgers. In the scheme of things, it’s a speeding ticket.” 

He sighs heavily. She stands up. 

"I'll fix it all with his people, and we'll let you know when and where. Depositions shouldn't take more than a few days, and then we can write up a settlement agreement."

"Fine."

He looks away and sets his fingers on the keyboard of his laptop, mouth twisting downward. 

She's at his office door when she turns and speaks again. 

"Mark."

He looks up. 

"Do you think he forgives you?" she asks. Her voice sounds strange. He blinks. 

"Yes," he says, automatically, taken aback. 

She looks, weirdly, kind of sad. "Okay," she says, biting her lip, and she leaves. 

He frowns at his computer, not knowing what she meant by that. He can’t get back to work for a long time afterwards.

 

They get Chinese that night, and Eduardo sits with his long legs tucked under him in a chair at the kitchen table scooping lo mein into his mouth with haphazard chopsticks, listening to Mark talk about it with raised eyebrows. 

“And she made a whole thing about what _you’d_ get out of it,” Mark is saying, snagging another spring roll from the bag on the table with his fingers. “Besides money.”

“Yeah, no,” Eduardo says, mouth twisting dubiously. “They talked to me about it too. I think she called them in the morning.” 

“It was my people’s idea, though?”

“Yeah.”

“Fucking Valleywag. We should just have waited ‘til we got home,” Mark mutters. “After the bar.”

Eduardo smiles, off-kilter, shrugging as if to say, _what can you do?_ Mark grins. 

“They said it was a win-win, though,” Eduardo adds hesitantly. “Makes me look good, not bad for Facebook either.”

“So they said.”

“They told me...” Eduardo is chewing on his lower lip, apparently studying the food spread over the table, and then he says, with the little stumbling hitch of breath that means he’s trying to get something out quickly, “They told me it doesn’t matter what I actually do with the money, I mean, it doesn’t matter if we -- combined our lives or got married or something, it’s just to have it in the books that it happened, balance it all out, I mean, that’s what they said.” He glances up at Mark, who’s staring at him a bit wide-eyed. “It’s not about me having it, is all I’m saying. It’s just about them being able to say that you, that you gave it to me.” He scrapes his teeth along his lower lip again, agitated. “And it’s pocket change anyway,” he adds softly. 

“Yeah,” Mark says blankly. “No -- right.” He shakes his head. “Whatever.”

Anxiety is still etched all over Eduardo’s face, and it takes Mark a second to get there, like it always does with Eduardo’s thought processes. For all his emotions are out there on display so much more than with most people, Mark still has to work to get a handle on them. He’s learning, though. It’s one of the things they’re working on, an unspoken kind of project, a crack in their repaired foundations that’s still in the process of being patched up. 

“Hey,” he says, setting down his spring roll so he can rest his hand flat on the table in front of Eduardo, emphatic. “Wardo. It’s not about the money. I mean,” he sighs. “The money is -- fine. I just think it’s stupid that we have to go through it at all.”

“Yeah,” Eduardo says, a little sigh of a word, his shoulders slumping. He sets down his lo mein, chopsticks rattling in the mostly empty container, and takes Mark’s hand, seemingly just because it’s there. Mark pops the rest of his spring roll in his mouth with his free hand and chews while Eduardo swipes his thumb back and forth across his knuckles.

“So, I think we should do it, though,” Eduardo says after a moment. 

The corners of Mark’s mouth turn down, but he doesn’t say anything.

“It _would_ be good, I think, for both of us, I think they’re right.” He looks upset now, and for a moment Mark doesn’t know if he wants to go ahead with it just to make Eduardo happy, or if the only thing that will make Eduardo happy is for all the circumstances surrounding this lawsuit in the first place to just disappear. He sometimes thinks that’s all Eduardo really wants, that he clings to it as though it’s a real possibility. 

“We can’t change what happened, Wardo,” he says softly.

“What?”

Mark shakes his head. “I don’t see the use in dragging it all back out like it’s brand new.” Every word is like pulling teeth, talking about _feelings_ , finding the words to capture where they are with the past and the present and each other. 

“I just think they’re right,” Eduardo says, voice low and small. He’s not looking at Mark anymore. “It would be good. Balance the books. And -- get me on some even footing here.” He glances up, and he looks so miserable that Mark just wants to put him in the car and drive him to the Napa Valley or the woods in Eureka or somewhere where there are no such legal structures as allow for things like depositions and settlements, where they can just be nothing but the two of them and everything can keep being okay. 

“You know I have to justify it to myself every day, being here,” Eduardo says quietly after a moment, looking up. His eyes sit heavy and dark on his face and his gaze hits Mark like a lead weight on his chest. “And -- I want to be with you. I _want_ this, but I -- it would be nice, to get, I don’t know,” he searches for words for a moment, frustration on his face, before lifting his hands, shrugging, “what’s owed to me.” 

Mark appreciates the note of resentment in his voice, though he suspects it’s there more as an indication that Eduardo knows how Mark is going to feel about the concept that he owes anyone anything, and less as an indication that Eduardo doesn’t believe it himself. 

“Yeah,” he allows, one clipped syllable and nothing more, because they are not hashing out who’s right and wrong here. It’s precisely the avoidance of conversations like this that’s kept them tentatively happy together this long.

Eduardo looks at him with those sad eyes and his face softening, and Mark notices absently that he’s still holding onto his hand. It’s nice, like a sentimental “fuck you” to the wedge he can already feel this situation trying to drive between them. 

He wants to ask, _do you forgive me?_ but he won’t do it. He doesn’t want to hear the answer right now. 

“Okay,” Mark says. “I’ll do it, on two conditions. One, you make breakfast beforehand.” Eduardo laughs, smiling down at the table before looking up at Mark through his lashes. “And two,” Mark goes on with a determinedly straight face, “we have sex right now.” 

Eduardo purses his lips around a grin like he’s trying and failing to school his features into seriousness. “You’ve got a deal,” he says, shifting his hand around Mark’s so he can shake it, meeting Mark’s eyes. Mark tries to put a lot of vaguely understood meaning into the look he gives Eduardo back, trying to tell him _it’ll be okay_ when really he thinks he’s the one who needs to hear that, and he’s not even sure what it’s about, anyway, only that he wishes this wasn’t happening. 

But if it’s for Eduardo. And -- it’s not about the money, Mark knows that now, feels good in the knowledge that two years ago he wouldn’t have been so sure.

He stands up and tugs Eduardo toward him by the hand he’s still holding. “Alright then,” he says, and Eduardo’s hand has come around the small of his back and he’s close enough that Mark has to tip his chin up a little to meet his eyes, “you promised.” 

Eduardo leans down and kisses him, full-on and obedient, plying Mark’s lips apart with his tongue and reaching up to stroke his thumb along Mark’s jaw and over his ear. Mark sinks into it easily, well-practiced in adapting his body to Eduardo’s. Sometimes Mark can’t believe how much time and energy they wasted on not having this, when of course it’s the only thing, when it’s more important and wonderful and indisputable than anything else that could try to get in the way. He pulls away, smiling smugly, and leads the way down the hall and up the stairs to the bedroom with Eduardo stumbling along behind him, his hand snaking up the back of Mark’s shirt, trying to nip at the back of his neck with careless lips, both of them laughing like it’s a relief to fall back into the routine of being okay with each other. 

 

ii. 

They start the following week, and Eduardo makes fresh coffee and rye toast and salmon scramble and Mark has the distinct feeling he’s being bought off, which is fine, because Eduardo’s salmon scramble is like a gift from heaven. 

He refuses to put on a suit, though, because there’s a fine line between grudging acceptance and willing participation and, unlike Eduardo, Mark is not willing to cross that line. Eduardo gives him a funny little smile when he comes downstairs in a wrinkled white button-down, no tie.

“Better than I was expecting,” he admits, and then he steps easily into Mark’s space and his fingers find the buttons of the shirt. “You’re one button off, though,” he murmurs, and fixes it while Mark looks at his mouth. When he’s done, Mark fits a hand at his hip wordlessly, the soft dove grey of his shirt touchable and expensive beneath his fingers, and he presses a kiss up under Eduardo’s jaw where it’s soft from shaving that morning, nuzzling at the skin. Eduardo closes his eyes, leaning his face against Mark’s temple. He always reacts that way to these little intimate moments of random affection, in love and overwhelmed, though Mark doesn’t know why he feels so strongly. It’s not some grand gesture; it’s just Eduardo’s skin is there and Mark wants to kiss it and so he does. If that’s love, then that’s just fine.

“Put a tie on,” Eduardo murmurs when Mark pulls back, and he kisses him once, briefly, on the lips, and it’s so nice that Mark can’t bring himself to argue.

They’re quiet in the car, wrapped up in an undeniable apprehension that only gets stronger as Mark rejects it mentally. Eduardo’s got his suit jacket on now, and it reminds Mark of a lot of bad times. For his part, he’s got his North Face zipped up to the collar over a black tie that Eduardo redid for him at the front door, chuckling with exasperation.

They’ve got their own lawyers waiting for them when they get there -- Mark’s, an older man with a lined, too-kind face, given to him by the legal department; Eduardo’s, a scary blonde woman, originating from parts unknown, the way a lot of Eduardo’s fancy business contacts tend to. They’d both met separately with their respective teams in the preceding days, hashing out game plans, though Mark didn’t pay much attention. He’s here to lose. It’s incredibly demeaning, and he’s trying not to think too hard about it. 

They walk in together, and Mark immediately feels awkward about it. It’s as though they ought to have taken two cars.

“This is such a fucking charade,” he mutters to Eduardo as they enter the glass-walled conference room, yellow-white lighting and high-backed Aeron chairs. 

“Let’s just get it over with,” Eduardo murmurs back, eyes on his lawyer, who’s watching them shrewdly from her seat across the room. She looks like she’s appraising this situation far too seriously for Mark’s liking, but he doesn’t say anything, and Eduardo leaves his side to sit on the other side of the table, while Mark sits beside his lawyer nearer to the door. The woman from legal who cooked up this whole scheme is there too, observing, apparently, along with a few others like her. She re-introduces herself as Marylin. 

And there’s the stenographer, who’s basically the whole point of this fucking thing. Mark realizes after a moment that he’s staring daggers at her without really meaning to, but she doesn’t look up from her keyboard. He settles into his chair, hands on the table. 

The first thing they talk about is Erica, which Mark will think later should have told him right off the bat to walk out the door. They’ve gotten her to give a statement, and it’s fucking humiliating, having this shit dragged back out from the dusty back corner of his proverbial sock drawer where it should have stayed forgotten forever. He thinks he sees a little bit of pity in Eduardo’s eyes, but he ignores it. If this is going to be about cutting him down, then fine. He was planning to be a semi-uncooperative asshole anyway. 

When he says, “Then I guess that would be the first time somebody’s lied under oath,” he catches the look on Eduardo’s face, a deadened kind of look, the kind he hasn’t seen there in a really long time, and it sends something prickling hot and angry and frightened all the way down to his bones. 

And then it’s Eduardo’s turn to start telling the story, and it dawns on Mark pretty quickly as the day wears on, interminably, that this is really Eduardo’s lawsuit, and so it’s going to be about things from Eduardo’s limited point of view. When Eduardo says that he wondered why Mark was coming to him and not his roommates, and then the money, that was why, Mark wants to haul him out into the hallway and get him up against the wall and shake him by the shoulders and say _Listen to yourself, god dammit, I asked you because you’re my best friend_

But he doesn’t, and he already feels bone-tired at the end of the day and worse to realize they only got up to the site launch. ( _You have no idea what that’s going to mean to my father. -- Sure I do._ ) He’d hoped there would be a part of him that could enjoy this, maybe, would be able to distract from the obvious discomfort of it by focusing on reliving the good parts, but there’s nothing good. 

He says it in the car, what he’d wanted to say all day: “There’s more to it than all of that.” His voice is low, gravelly, and he doesn’t mean to sound as hurt as he hears it coming out, but there it is. “You know there is. About why I asked you, and everything.” _I didn’t want you to leave me_ , he thinks heavily, _even then._

Eduardo’s eyes are on the road. “I’m just feeding them what they want to hear,” he says in an unconvincing monotone. Mark doesn’t press the point. 

Eduardo is oddly quiet again after that, in the way that usually means he’s got something else he wants to say.

“Why _did_ you say that?” he says, sure enough, after a while. “The diversity thing... thing?"

Mark shrugs cautiously, looking at him. Eduardo’s eyes are still trained forward, but they’re over-bright in that way that Mark thinks he's learned means agitation.

"It was a long time ago, Wardo," he offers. The words fall flat.

Eduardo shakes his head. “No, yeah," he says, and he only glances over at Mark for a split second. Mark feels a sudden thrill of foreboding, and a second one as he probes the first mentally for an explanation. He tries to pretend he doesn't know exactly what's brewing here, and rolls down the window to feel the cool air on his face.

They’re quiet into the night after dinner, catching up on work they missed being out of their respective offices all day. On the couch with their laptops, Eduardo stretches his legs out, tucks his toes beneath Mark’s thighs, and it’s comfortable, and familiar, a gesture toward not letting it all get to them. Mark appreciates it, but still, he isn’t happy. 

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asks at one point into the silence. It’s almost midnight. Eduardo tugs one of his earbuds out of his ear.

“What?”

“I mean, _why_ are we doing this? If you can give me a reason that outweighs the negatives, then--”

“Mark, it’s not the same for me,” Eduardo cuts in with a frail kind of patience shelling his voice. “You know, I... this has always been harder for me than it has been for you.”

“What?”

Eduardo grimaces. “I don’t know. Being -- back here.”

“With me.”

“Mark.” His voice is soft and sad and it makes Mark angrier to hear, somehow. 

“Okay,” he says, flat. He can hear the quiet, tinny strains of whatever Eduardo’s listening to emanating from his dangling earbud, unidentifiable, and he flicks his head irritably like he’s trying to shake off a fly.

Eduardo just keeps looking at him, that little half-frustrated frown on his face, until Mark says, “Let’s talk if you wanna talk. If you have something you’re... whatever, something you still need to talk about, we can -- do that.”

Eduardo kind of laughs, but it doesn’t bring Mark any relief. “You can’t just do it like that.”

“I don’t see why not.”

Eduardo sighs. “ _You_ don’t _talk_ about things, Mark.” He glances down at his computer screen, possibly just to avoid Mark’s eye, Mark isn’t sure. “And, I mean, that’s okay, I get that about you, but -- let’s just keep doing this a little longer, okay? Maybe it’ll be therapeutic. Just -- give it some time. They were right about the pros, anyway, and... the cons are okay. We’ll be fine.” 

“Therapeutic,” Mark repeats, trying very hard not to roll his eyes. 

“Yeah.”

“We don’t need therapy.”

“Mark, I’m trying, y’know, to make lemonade here.”

Mark shrugs and shuts the lid of his computer. “I just don't see why we're electing to deal with the lemons in the first place,” he says, and stands up. “You want to come to bed?”

Eduardo sighs again, then pulls the other earbud out of his ear and closes his computer too. “Yeah,” he says, and he follows Mark out of the living room.

Lying in the dark that night, everything in blue-grey shadow, Mark's thinking about it, what the lawyer had asked him last week about forgiveness. He knows the answer, of course, saw it writ apparent in every duck of Eduardo's features all day, in the way he talked about it like it was freshly painful, and he wonders why he stayed. He doesn't particularly want to ask that either. 

Eduardo's hand rests on his side, beneath his t-shirt where he's pushed it up to sweep his thumb over the rails of Mark's ribs, rhythmic. Mark rolls over beneath the touch to face him. He’s awake, as Mark had known he was, his face soft and indistinct in the unlit room.

"Wardo," he says, voice barely above a whisper, and his heart leaps and his mouth stalls around the words once, twice, and then he says, "you know I love you, don't you?"

It's the first time he's said it. As with many things, he'd never really seen the point, until now. 

Eduardo’s thumb stills momentarily against Mark's skin. "Yeah. Yeah, I do," he says, and he smiles in the dark, a small but marveling smile. "Mark." He laughs the name out, a characteristic fond bemusement. "I love you, too." 

"Then why are we doing this?"

Eduardo’s eyes drop from his, and he resumes his stroking of Mark's side. 

"You can't just hide from things," he murmurs after a while. "Just pretending they're better won't make them so."

"I'm not pretending," Mark says. 

"I know.” He slides his hand up over the plane of Mark’s chest, fitting it at his collarbone, fingers tucked into the curve of his shoulder beneath his shirt. “I just... need to," he says softly, almost like it's to himself. "I -- I came back for you, not to be over it, does that make sense? Talking it through--" 

"Publicly. And getting paid."

"Yeah," Eduardo says shortly, an edge creeping into his voice. "Those too." 

_What about what I want_ , Mark thinks, but he doesn’t say it, because there’s a limit to the immunity the dark lends to honesty, to what he can say without the teeth the words would have in daylight, and he doesn’t want to provoke this any more than necessary. 

He sighs. "Breakfast tomorrow," he says, and noses a kiss under Eduardo’s ear. 

"Thank you," Eduardo whispers, somewhere into his hair. Mark squeezes his eyes shut and hopes harder than he's ever hoped for anything that it'll be okay. 

 

iii. 

Cutting into a fried egg the next morning, Mark thinks absently that it’s kind of like this situation, this egg, because the yolk isn’t as done as he’d thought it was and it’s spilling out onto the plate with alarming intensity now that he’s broken into it. It makes him think of how they’re existing, currently, inside such a fragile meniscus, and every hairline fracture in it lets more of these unresolved things Eduardo seems to have been carrying around with him spill out all over the damned place. 

Then it occurs to Mark that he’s thinking in metaphors and this is not a good sign. He refills his coffee. Eduardo is reading the Chronicle business section, not talking. They’re doing Sean today. 

Sean, well -- the thing about Sean is that Mark has always thought of him as the heart of the matter, and what’s more, they’ve never once discussed him, not even for a second. He doesn’t know if Eduardo ascribes as much responsibility to him as Mark does, but they’re obviously about to find out. Mark suspects he won’t like the answer either way. 

They’re quieter still in the car on the way to the legal offices, and Mark chews on his fingernails and feels like he’s crawling out of his skin. Eduardo, driving, just stares at the road, but he just looks kind of tired and sad rather than angry, and it’s all just abysmally shitty, Mark thinks. He wonders for the umpteenth time why he hasn’t just dug his heels in and refused to go along with it just for Eduardo’s sake. But he knows that would probably create as many problems as this has, and would solve none, to boot. 

_But maybe it would be better_ , he thinks miserably. _At least that way we’d be having the fight in private._

The first thing they talk about is the expansion, and Mark can see the open regret on Eduardo’s face as he tells how it was his idea for them to expand westward, how he knows in that moment that it’s all traceable back to him. Mark is thinking about the night in the bar with the girls, the high whine of Eduardo’s gasping breath on the other side of a too-thin bathroom stall divider, the way Erica had said “good luck with your video game” with such careless derision that it had felt like a kidney punch. He tunes out Eduardo’s voice beneath the memories, staring down at the table, and isn’t sorry to miss the first hour or so of conversation. 

“Eduardo,” prompts the blonde lady lawyer -- Gretchen, it turned out her name is -- “spring break you and Mr. Zuckerberg took a trip to New York.” Mark tunes back in dully. Eduardo talks about the money, and the meetings, and Mark is resisting the urge to roll his eyes so hard it feels like a headache. He cannot believe they’re wasting time on this shit. Hindsight, sure, but honestly. 

“How did you feel the meetings went?” the lawyer asks.

“They went terribly,” Eduardo says after a moment’s hesitation, glancing at Mark. “Mark was asleep--”

“I was not asleep,” Mark cuts in, glancing around the table, because he’ll let them get away with a certain level of history-altering here, but even he has his limits.

“Can I rephrase my answer?” Eduardo says tightly. “I wish he’d been asleep.” His gaze slides over to Mark, tired-eyed and spiteful. Mark looks away, shaking his head. He’d thought talking about even doing this with Eduardo was like pulling teeth. He hadn’t known the meaning of the words. 

And then: Sean. 

Eduardo goes, “I’m not a psychiatrist, but --” and Mark’s lawyer says, “I’m glad we’ve got that on the record,” and Mark snorts humorlessly, and that’s the last time he feels anything resembling a positive emotion for the rest of the day. Listening to Eduardo going through it, Mark can’t believe he’d ever thought this would go another way. He can remember it now, with the rationality of looking back he hadn’t had at the time, the way Eduardo’s features had been actually discolored, pasty, with the force of the hatred for Sean he was tamping down in an effort to be professional, and it was so goddamn ridiculous, because Sean was _it,_ Eduardo _had_ to see that. Volatile, yes, but also the only person with the vision to get them off the ground.

And Mark had been in between the two of them, sitting there with this amazing, world-changing thing he’d made in his hands and the drive to take it to astronomical heights burning directionless within him, and on one side was Sean, who had done it himself already, who was a fucking renegade and who _believed_ in Facebook, and on the other side was Eduardo, who only cared about this -- Mark can see this now as plain as day -- insofar as he cared about Mark. 

That was the crux of it, wasn’t it? Eduardo couldn’t see the forest for the trees, and just as often couldn’t even see the trees for Mark. And there’s something in that that hurts Mark on a molecular level, knowing that there was this person who felt so deeply about him and that he chose business and success and the preservation of this hugely important invention over that person. 

But now he has both. It’s a happy ending. And Eduardo is fucking it all up over a grudge.

“He owned Mark from that dinner,” Eduardo says, and Mark curls his hands into fists under the table to stop himself from shaking, he’s so insulted. He’d always kind of known Eduardo felt this way, but there was a good reason they’d never talked it out. He feels sick. 

And then, of all fucking things, the _chicken_ comes up, and Mark had _expressly told them_ to leave this one alone and he actually reaches for the paper Sy pulls out, he’s so uninterested in delving into this. It doesn’t even -- Eduardo did plenty of things that could be considered legitimate grounds for termination, and this was so low on the list it was practically in the basement. And of course, Eduardo fights petty fire with petty fire and brings up fucking art history, Jesus Christ, and Mark is so far past over all of this he can’t even comprehend it. 

“Oops,” Eduardo says, a single syllable, and Mark can see that part of him is relishing this and he relishes it right back when Eduardo goes on, “You told your lawyers I was torturing animals?” His eyes slide over to Mark’s, narrowed and incredulous, like _I can’t even believe you._

They’re staring icy daggers at each other way more than they have yet in this whole process, and Mark had wanted anything but for it to get like this, if for no reason other than it’s patently unpleasant. But it’s a moment of such exasperation that it feels, suddenly, very real -- as though they were doing this when Eduardo had first meant to, as though any of this is still an active problem. Maybe it is. Maybe that’s what Mark’s learning here.

Sy cuts in, “No, he didn’t tell us about it at all. Our litigators are capable of finding a Crimson article. In fact, when we raised the subject with him, he defended you.” 

Eduardo glances back at him again, slightly cowed. Mark feels a cold, spiteful rush of satisfaction when he mouths in kind, slumped low in his seat, “Oops.” 

There’s a lot more that goes on that day -- his jibe at Eduardo’s lawyer about just checking her math on that, and the utterly loveless look on Eduardo’s face, and the pain of remembering Eduardo’s grin and his laugh and the crinkling corners of his eyes in the CS lab with everything up in fireworks around them, remembering feeling that warmth in his chest, brimming over, remembering thinking for the first time that this boy was his favorite person in the whole world, and now Eduardo will not look at him. 

And it’s summer, and they’re parting ways, and yeah, Mark forgot about the thing with the internship, but there was so fucking much going on, and Eduardo wasn’t there. He wasn’t there, and Sean had gotten that predatory look on his face every time he’d asked the same question and heard that same answer, while Mark’s phone buzzed with another useless, forgettable text from New York about absurdly low-end advertising searches and sublets and Christy, and Mark had been busy changing the fucking world, he’d been busy building an empire, and it was Sean who was helping him do it. It’s not opinion -- it’s the truth. The fact that Eduardo continues to treat it as a matter of perspective is, perhaps, the clearest proof of why he was screwing himself out even then. 

But in the end, with an early dusk falling outside and the conference room all airless and suffocating, they get wrapped up in that night Eduardo finally showed up in Palo Alto, and everything else becomes inconsequential to the memory of his face, dripping with rain, hair plastered to his forehead and his eyes so burning dark that Mark can’t remember seeing the whites of them, even with Eduardo as close up in his face as they’d ever gotten back then, the yellow light of that claustrophobic fucking hallway pressing in around them, asphyxiating them, and Mark was _pouring his fucking heart out_ and all Eduardo said was, “What did you mean get left behind?”

And he hates him. He hates that he hadn’t just shoved him up against the wall all those years ago and kissed him until he understood, he hates him for what came next and for bringing it on himself and for not ever understanding even still, he hates him for doing this now and he hates himself for going along with it, but in the final imploding minutes of the day, he hates Eduardo most of all. 

In the car, things are cracking tense between them. 

“So,” Mark mutters finally into the silence. He can’t help himself. “The gloves come off.” 

“Please don’t talk,” Eduardo replies through gritted teeth. Mark doesn’t, because he knows that voice and it thrills acidly through him -- Eduardo angry, Eduardo actually riled into fighting, really fighting, like he so rarely is (and when he is it’s an explosion). Maybe this will be good. Maybe it’ll be better. Mark shoves his hands underneath his thighs in the passenger seat and, as requested, says nothing in reply. 

They’ve only just gotten through the front door when he reaches for Eduardo’s wrist, thinking he’ll stop him, thinking that they can’t go on without exchanging words about this, at least. As soon as his fingers brush Eduardo’s skin, though, Eduardo spins around and grabs Mark by the arm and shoves him into the wall, hard, making the loose change in the bowl on the little side table jump. Mark stares up at him, wide-eyed and not breathing, as Eduardo crowds down into his space. The heat in his eyes is so intense it’s making Mark’s throat dry. He grabs at Eduardo’s hip, trying to pull him in, and Eduardo follows without hesitation, and then they’re just pressed together against the wall, a flush line, and Mark doesn’t want to be the first one to move, to speak. He’s half-hard already in his dress pants just from the way Eduardo’s looking at him, from the way it’s completely silent in the house but for their little wisps of breath. 

Eduardo shifts minutely against him and Mark pulls their hips together harder, a sudden, grappling movement, and then they’ve got their arms bracketed around one another, all close-knit and tangled up. Eduardo’s breath is hot on Mark’s cheek and Mark fists his hand in Eduardo’s hair behind his head and pulls him down til their mouths are fitted half together, slick lips and Mark’s teeth baring themselves, nipping into Eduardo’s mouth, Eduardo holding his head on one side at his ear, his fingers tight, gripping, almost painful. He works his tongue in against Mark’s, sucking at his lower lip, and it’s all messy, unromantic, barely a kiss at all, just pushing together for a tighter closeness like if he can get right up inside Mark it will change things. 

Mark groans out a nothing-sound when Eduardo works a thigh between his legs and pushes up, biting along his cheek, spit on his skin and Eduardo’s panting breath in his ear, and he doesn’t know what they’re doing only that he can’t let go of Eduardo, wants to tear him open and be torn open by him and put them back together in a way where everything’s okay. Eduardo ruts into him again and Mark’s hips buck forward, feeling the hard line of Eduardo’s erection behind his fly. 

Eduardo leans in closer, lips dragging hot along Mark’s ear. He rasps out, a low, rough whisper, “I’m gonna fuck you.” Mark’s closes his eyes, tipping his head back to get Eduardo’s lips on his neck. There’s a part of him that’s none too small that likes Eduardo best this way, far more than his soft smiles and careful, quiet touches, likes him burning angry and careless, likes to feel like all their history is part of this. He reaches between them, slow and deliberate, re-angling himself to look steady into Eduardo’s eyes, before palming his cock through his slacks. 

Eduardo’s hips stutter forward and he hisses through his teeth. “Bedroom,” he practically spits, jerking back from Mark as though it’s with difficulty.

Mark doesn’t remember getting down the hallway and up the stairs, doesn’t remember getting into their room and turning the lights on, doesn’t remember kicking off his shoes, only remembers Eduardo right there when he turns around, his fingers rough and quick at Mark’s fly. He yanks his pants down his skinny legs, and his briefs, leaving Mark’s cock hard and aching in the open air. The tie comes off in a rough stroke that tugs against Mark’s throat a little, making his dick twitch, and then Eduardo unbuttons his shirt as though he’d rather be ripping at it, popping buttons. 

His fingers are trembling just the tiniest bit, almost like a low vibration deep in his bones, and Mark pretends not to notice. He reaches for the buttons of Eduardo’s shirt but Eduardo slaps his hand away. 

“On the bed,” he says, and Mark stumbles backwards. He pulls his socks off and leaves them on the floor, scooting up toward the headboard. Having Eduardo still fully clothed while he’s naked and sprawled back on top of the comforter, legs sagging open and erection bobbing up toward his stomach, makes his whole body thrill. Eduardo watches him, face dark and unreadable, while he undresses. Mark’s muscles quiver beneath his skin. 

Eduardo crawls onto the bed toward him, between his spread knees, and begins to kiss him again, sucking hard on his lower lip. He drops his hips against Mark’s, rubbing their cocks together and sighing harsh against Mark’s jawline. It’s nowhere near enough friction, the motions too imprecise and ineffectual, and Mark whines, pulling Eduardo against him with his knees crooked around his hips. 

“Greedy,” Eduardo mumbles into his neck, “you can’t wait for me to fuck you,” and Mark’s lips fall open, head dropping back.

“Fuck,” he gasps, and he’s glad they’re doing this instead of talking. He’s sick of talking. Eduardo grabs his Mark’s dick and squeezes up the base, rubbing his thumb rough over the head before fisting it against his own with his long fingers, a hot, velvet slip of skin on skin. 

“Just -- do it already,” Mark wheezes out, and Eduardo laughs low and flat, licking his lips. 

“Slut,” he says casually, and it’s not sexy, not even mean. He just sounds so suddenly unhappy, looking side-long at Mark with those dark, blown-open eyes as he reaches across his body for the drawer of the bedside table. Mark just gapes at him, too strung-out on want to do much else. 

Eduardo puts a condom and the little bottle of lube on the bed next to them and trails his index along the inside of Mark’s leg when he settles back on his haunches between his thighs, a shiver-light touch over the soft pit of his ankle and up his shin and behind his knee so that Mark swallows down a shudder. He lubes up his fingers and throws one of Mark’s legs over his shoulder. 

It occurs to Mark then that the lights are on, that they haven’t had dinner yet, that this is about Sean, that it’s about how Mark is treating this whole situation, and it all flashes through his mind, blurred together by Eduardo’s hands on him, Eduardo’s eyes like two black smudges set deep into face -- how Eduardo isn’t looking at him and yet his hands and his body and his breath are all over Mark like he couldn’t extricate himself if he wanted to which, Mark wonders if he does. 

Then the first two fingers breach him in one quick motion, slick and tight, and Mark’s hips lift as his spine arches, body contorting, pushing down and pulling away in one. Eduardo pushes in slow but not as slow as usual, opening Mark up, and bumps his prostate lightly once with his fingertips. Mark cries out, weak and helpless. Eduardo does it again, and Mark’s shoulder blades dig into the mattress. 

Then Eduardo pulls his fingers out, too sudden, leaving Mark feeling slippery but still tight, too tight, and he knows what’s coming as he watches Eduardo roll on the condom. There’s more lube, which is thoughtful of him, but Mark is still shiver-tense with anticipation and he tries to relax. He thinks Eduardo must want him to beg, want him to come apart beneath him in such a different way than normal, normal when Eduardo breaks him down slow and languid and loving, must want him to hate himself for submitting like this. And Mark knows he’ll do it all and it still won’t change a fucking thing, and that, that is the part Eduardo fails to see, that is the heart of the matter. 

He thinks vaguely, feverishly, of saying this out loud, but Eduardo shuts him up with the sudden blunt press of the head of his cock and then one long, rough thrust that takes him all the way in, rocking them back toward the headboard and tearing a guttural little noise from the back of Mark's throat. There’s searing heat beating through Mark’s whole body, and he’s tight around Eduardo, feels that he is, that burning stretch, and this is about more than the fullness or the closeness, more than feeling so stuffed that he can’t find where he stops and Eduardo begins. It’s a better kind of desperate than being pliant and boneless with want, this knotted tension and the burn of his own heartbeat in his chest and somewhere deep inside, a too-much-not-enough-all of Eduardo that makes Mark feel like he suffocating, on the edge of something huge. 

It’s an exercise in power, as Eduardo draws back and drives in again. It’s a way for Eduardo be angry and still not angry with the sheer force of his body over Mark’s, the dark heat of his eyes somewhere around Mark's cheekbone and the too-quick shove of his hips, his fingers bruising tight around Mark's ribs and his thin waist trying to find an angle, the other hand in his hair gripping relentlessly. Mark feels shiver-desperate and spiteful and disdaining, somehow, all at once. He rakes a hand at Eduardo’s lower back, wanting more and wanting to fight and not knowing what he wants anymore.

"How does that feel," Eduardo grinds out when he snaps his hips forward again and Mark takes it, has to, helplessly, with a high arch of his back and a keen that sounds like it's coming from someone else's mouth. "You like that?"

Mark shudders all over, squeezing his eyes shut. _I shouldn’t but I do,_ he thinks, but out loud he says, tight, "Am I supposed to?" the words getting a little lost in a gasp as Eduardo pulls all the way out and then drives in again, too fast. His cock is thick and hot and Mark feels utterly breathless, feverish. He tightens the leg he has thrown around Eduardo’s hips.

Eduardo's lips are at his collarbone, and he mumbles, "I dunno," with momentary candor into the flushed skin. Mark laughs, a dry, humorless cough that makes his stomach cave, sending heat rushing to his groin.

"God," he gasps out. He never recognizes the sound of his own voice when Eduardo's fucking him so hard and desperate like this, the half-words all breathless and involuntary, like they’re not connected to his brain. It makes him feel outside of himself and out of control and he _likes_ it, clinging to this knife-edge between what's real and what's not, what's Eduardo hating him and Eduardo loving him and what's getting muddled in between. He digs his fingers into Eduardo's back, bent almost in two at the waist and his ankles tangling at Eduardo’s lower back, feeling skin slick with sweat slip beneath his fingers, the taut cording of Eduardo’s muscles as he trembles, strung tight above Mark, just _pushing_ relentlessly into him even there's nowhere left for him to go. 

He hasn’t touched Mark yet and Mark’s still going crazy with want, not knowing if Eduardo’s even going to touch him and afraid, somehow, to ask, and that fear is delicious and sudden, curling like a drug through his chest. Eduardo’s arms tighten around him and Mark thinks he’s coming and he tenses, but he’s only trying to clutch Mark closer, it seems, and then just like that Mark knows, with a deep stab of emotion, what this is. It’s Eduardo saying _I hate you I hate you I hate you and I don’t ever want to have to leave you again_ \-- saying, _remember what it is to be us, underneath everything, please remember._ It’s Eduardo trying not to forget. 

Mark’s trying, too. He is. He gasps as Eduardo’s fingers rake up the back of his thigh in a way that’s meant to scratch, digs his heels into Eduardo’s hips and chokes out, “Come on, fucking -- do it, Wardo --” and he cants his hips up to meet Eduardo’s next thrust and Eduardo groans desperately, face buried in Mark’s shoulder and one hand fisted so tight in his hair that it hurts, and comes, his whole body shuddering jerkily, inside him. 

_Because I asked him to,_ Mark thinks, and it takes his breath away. He bites his lip, hard, head thrown back, hears a “please” slip past his lips that he didn’t mean to say, his cock so aching hard now that he can feel the air against it. 

His hips sag as Eduardo shifts back, pulling out of him -- all angles, and Mark knows he’s going to have bruises -- and he watches as Eduardo slips the condom off his softening cock, gets up and throws it out in the bathroom. 

“Take your time,” he grinds out. Eduardo ignores this. He isn’t looking at Mark.

Then he’s back on the bed, and he kneels between Mark’s legs again and slips a hand down the side of his neck, languid. His thumb runs up the column of Mark’s throat, tipping it back further, the exposed white skin mottled with the red of Mark’s full-body flush and the scrape-lines of Eduardo’s teeth. His hooded eyes drag upward from the sight to meet Mark’s.

“Jerk yourself off,” he orders, gravelly. His hand hasn’t left Mark’s throat and it’s just this side of too tight and Mark’s hand is on his cock faster than he can think, the touch too much and not even close to enough from the first second. He groans, twisting beneath Eduardo, body pulling and arching like he’s on strings as he strokes up hard and tight. 

“Mark.” Eduardo’s voice is strange, low, and it makes Mark’s whole body thrill and his hand pause as he listens. “Come when I say you can.” 

Mark gasps out a nothing-noise, a desperate half-moan that might have been meant to be Eduardo’s name, once, and then, “Mother _fuck_ ,” a little more clearly. He twists his wrist slow, dragging his fisted palm along his cock, and squeezes his eyes shut as Eduardo’s hands trail over his chest, fingertips pressing down against his nipples and rubbing back up. 

“Look at you,” Eduardo whispers, like he doesn’t even know he’s saying it. He mouths at Mark’s clavicle, biting down on it lightly, and then drops a hand between their bodies, contorted like they’re tied in a knot, and rubs a finger over Mark’s hole, wet with lube and oversensitive. 

“Oh, oh god, Wardo,” Mark moans, wanton and not caring, quickening his hand on his cock as Eduardo fingers the tight ring of muscle and then pushes two fingers in to the second knuckle. It draws out an ache in Mark’s thighs and deep in his stomach, and he squirms around the feeling, gasping out all the air in his lungs and feeling himself tighten around Eduardo’s fingers when they just brush his prostate. The two of them are a disaster of angles and trembling closeness and it’s all just enough to keep Mark feeling full and undeniably owned. He squeezes at the head of his cock, biting his lip so hard it’s painful, throwing his head back and curling his toes behind Eduardo’s back. 

“Can you take another one?” Eduardo asks, and Mark just groans, chest rising and falling rapidly. “I think you can,” Eduardo says low in his throat, and but he finds the lube first and puts a little more on the hand he’s got still shoved between their bodies before slipping a third finger in alongside the first two, stretching Mark tight inside him. 

“Fuck,” Mark gasps out, “fuck, oh, fuck,” bearing down on Eduardo’s hand and feeling like he’s coming apart at the seams. It doesn’t burn; it’s just so much to take so soon after Eduardo had fucked him all fast and rough like that, the feeling indescribable, aching deep in the best way. 

“Mark,” Eduardo sighs out, harsh and exhausted. Mark fumbles a hand at Eduardo’s cheek, keeping the other on his cock and pulling their bodies closer so he can kiss him, messy and panting, Eduardo’s fingers still worming into Mark, ghosting over his prostate and making his hips jerk listlessly. 

Eduardo’s eyes flutter closed, his eyelashes tickling. “C’mon, baby,” he whispers feather-quiet against Mark’s cheek, little more than breath, and Mark could swear his heart stalls in his chest from how much that’s too much for him to handle. He squeezes his eyes shut.

“Wardo, tell me when,” he blurts out, the words jumbling high in his throat. Eduardo slips his free hand beneath Mark’s ass, palming him behind the hips, and pulls, fucking him downward slowly onto his fingers while Mark’s hand twists feebly against his cock. He needs to come so badly it’s painful and yet he doesn’t want to, doesn’t want Eduardo to ever tell him to, because once this ends he doesn’t know what’s going to happen. 

Eduardo’s breathing is coming in rough gasps, his own hips jerking slightly as he fucks Mark faster onto his hand, and Mark feels the head of his cock bump the back of his thigh, starting to get just a little hard again. His fingers are bruising into Mark’s prostate on every other thrust, making heat spark through his muscles, and his vision is actually going spotty and he opens his mouth to do something, moan, beg, anything, but all that comes out is a choked-off little sob. 

“Mark, _fuck_ ,” Eduardo gasps, lips stammering as he watches Mark’s body move, trembling, and he dips his head to suck hard on Mark’s throat, eyebrows pinched. “Don’t you dare stop,” he exhales. Mark shakes his head side to side, clutching at the back of Eduardo’s neck with one hand while he just squeezes the base of his cock tight to keep from coming. 

“Please,” he whimpers, “please.”

Eduardo drives his fingers all the way into him, bearing down into Mark’s space, and when they’re completely flush together he brushes his lips over the hinge of Mark’s jaw and says, all low in his throat, “Do it,” and Mark just loosens his fist and goes to pieces underneath him, mind white, his orgasm exploding through him. Eduardo works him through it, thumb stroking at his hip, and when Mark stills finally he pulls his fingers out gently. Mark just lies there fucked into oblivion under him, staring at the ceiling and panting into his neck and holding onto him, unable to move or think. 

Eventually Eduardo sits back, and Mark drags a hand down his chest through the thin sheen of sweat on his flushed skin, looking into his eyes. They just stare at each other for a moment, and then Mark drags himself off the bed, brushing past Eduardo and staggering to the bathroom, a little bow-legged. He shuts the door behind him, not knowing whether Eduardo will follow, and turns on the shower. 

He’d meant to just rinse off or whatever, but once he’s standing under the hot spray, he feels suddenly filthy, the leavings of the whole day caked onto his skin, and he wants to get clean, like it never happened at that deposition table or back in college. So he sets about washing everything. 

His face is soapy and his eyes are squeezed shut when he hears the bathroom door open, faint under the noise of the shower.

“Wardo?” he says, awkward, lips pursed away from the suds on his cheeks. He sticks his face under the spray and scrubs at it. 

The rings of the shower curtain clink wetly against the rod and there’s a gust of cold air against his skin, and then he feels hands slip around his waist and a familiar nose against the side of his neck, and lips, unmoving on his skin. He can tell Eduardo’s hands because they’re oddly a little calloused for a rich boy who’s never worked outside an office, the palms rough and the pads of his fingers like a cellist’s, solid. Mark ought to have calluses like those from coding, but all he has is the worn insides of his wrists where they always rub against the edges of his laptop and his desk.

“Hey,” he says after a moment in which Eduardo just stands naked behind him, holding him slackly. Mark can feel his chest meeting Mark’s shoulder blades as he breathes, but there’s silence, still, so he turns within the parentheticals of Eduardo’s arms and looks up into his face.

Eduardo’s eyes are wet, blown open and dark like they get sometimes, and Mark tries to pretend it’s just from the shower. He puts his hands on Eduardo’s chest, watching the water run down over the rails of his ribs, and he suddenly feels a visceral rush of sadness, like a physical clotting in his chest, a deep, crippling ache. His fingers curl against Eduardo’s skin, and he looks up again, desperate for Eduardo to say something, about what just happened, maybe, or about anything, say all the things Mark can’t articulate -- but Eduardo just noses against his ear, into his limp, wet curls, his hands loose at Mark’s hips, and Mark slides a hand around the back of his neck and angles back gently so that their faces are just touching, lips imprecise and aimless. Eduardo’s eyes flutter closed against Mark’s cheek and Mark stares at his skin, close enough that he can feel his eyelashes on it, close enough that it goes blurry and he can see the shapes of all Eduardo’s minute imperfections and tiny, forgotten scars. 

They stand beneath the spray like that, the water soaking off Mark’s every defense and denial, so that all he can do is clutch at Eduardo as though they’ll both wash away like sand through his fingers if he lets go now. It’s so different, so completely polar-opposite from the sex they’d just had in the bedroom that Mark’s throat goes tight. It’s Eduardo trying again to say, _please let us be alright, I need us to be alright_ , and it’s Mark trying to tell him that they can be and it’s everything getting lost in the middle. They can’t seem to find a way to bridge the gap, no matter what they do, and Mark can’t put any of this to words, doesn’t think he’d be able to if he tried. He feels Eduardo’s fingers tracing the knots of his spine, and he closes his eyes against his skin. 

After a while, Eduardo disentangles himself gently and looks at Mark once, for just a second, his expression inscrutable. Then he steps out of the shower. Mark hears the rustling of a towel and then the shutting of the door, and he rests his forehead against the cool, slick tiles and closes his eyes. 

 

“I think we should call it off,” Mark says that night, hours later, after they’d each retreated to their home offices for separate dinners and to work. He’s sitting on the edge of the bed, pulling off his socks. Eduardo had changed the sheets. Mark hadn’t said anything about it, and they haven’t talked about earlier, what happened right after they got home. Mark doesn’t think they’re probably going to, and it’s maybe for the best.

“What?” Eduardo is at the dresser with his back to Mark, taking off his watch, twisting his signet ring restlessly around his finger. 

“The depositions,” Mark says. “The suit, whatever, I think we should call it off.”

“We can’t call it off.” 

“We can do whatever we want.” 

Eduardo turns, fingers at the buttons of his shirt now. 

“Why do you want to do that?” His voice is even, but his darkening face gives him away.

Mark gives a short sigh. “I’d have thought that would be obvious,” he says tightly. 

“I want to hear you say it,” Eduardo says, low, and Mark grits his teeth.

“Because -- going through it all again is --” He dithers, frustrated. “We were doing fine before this,” he pronounces carefully, meeting Eduardo’s eyes. “I just don’t see the point. If it’s the money you--”

“It’s not the money,” Eduardo says, half-incredulous, closing his eyes. “So we’re just supposed to pretend it didn’t happen? Any of it? Never talk about it?”

“I didn’t say that,” Mark says levelly. “And we have talked about it.”

“Enough, you think?”

Mark looks at him, trying to exude a sense of calm, trying to say with his face, _I’m not looking for a fight here_. He doesn’t know if it works. It usually doesn’t. 

“All I’m saying,” he says, “is that I think we’re putting ourselves through a needless, whatever -- _hardship_ here and it’s unpleasant and it’s only making you upset.” 

Shit. “Making us upset,” he amends, but the damage is done.

“You have no idea.” Eduardo’s voice is gravelly and poisonous and it’s like a physical jab, bruising in the center of Mark’s chest. Eduardo turns on his heel and slams the bedroom door behind him, and Mark lets his breath out in a low whoosh. 

He takes several deep breaths, pressing his palm against his forehead and then curling his fingers until the nails dig into his skin and he trembles for a second and then stops. Forgiveness, Mark thinks, is a siren. Eduardo pulls him in with the promise of it, over and over, but what he finds every time is still just ugly. 

He gives Eduardo a minute before he follows, which he thinks is to his credit. 

Eduardo is sitting stiffly on the couch when Mark comes into the dark living room, his bony elbows on his thighs and palms flat together between his knees, head bowed forward. There’s a shaft of moonlight across his bare feet, and Mark is brought up short by the sight for a moment, the familiar lines of his tendons and the delicate angles of his bones cast in sharp relief. 

He sits down next to him, looking straight ahead too, and it’s a long time before he speaks. 

“I get that a lot of this is on me,” he says softly, finally, clenching his jaw against the concession. “And I’m not trying to ignore the past, Wardo, I’m just -- it’s _done_ , I mean, it _happened_ , and I’m trying to think about what’s best for us, because... I want to be with you. And I want us to be happy.”

Eduardo doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t even move. 

“If there’s something you want to talk about, let’s just. Talk about it. Here,” Mark says. “Not -- with the lawyers, and the stenographer, Wardo, it just seems incredibly pointless and masochistic.” He takes a breath. “That’s all I’m saying.” 

Eduardo looks over at him. “I’m not the only one being a masochist, you know,” he says, and Mark jolts a little. “You could have said no.”

“You wanted to,” Mark says, the words sharp and angry. “I’m doing this for _you._ ”

Eduardo tilts his head sadly, like he means to lean it on Mark’s shoulder but can’t bring himself to do it. “This -- this isn’t me looking for a reason to, to hate you, I just,” he takes a wet little breath, choking in his throat, “I can’t just sweep it under the rug and act like everything’s okay.” His voice catches on the last word. 

“I’m not asking you to.” Mark’s going for placating but ends up a little impatient. “And we _were_ okay,” he adds, “or, getting there, before--”

“We weren’t,” Eduardo says softly. “We were just pretending.”

“ _I_ was okay.” 

“Of course you were,” Eduardo bites off. 

Mark sits there, close enough to touch Eduardo but not even considering it, and finally he says shortly, “Just -- don’t throw away a good thing for the sake of wallowing.” It’s harsh but it’s the truth, and he wants Eduardo to hear it, needs him to understand that he’s indulging in damaging impulses and he’s just fucking everything up and Mark has worked too hard on them and on this to let him do it. 

“You ruined my life, Mark,” Eduardo says very quietly, not looking at him.

“You’re fine.” Mark’s voice comes out colder than he intends, and he sits there reveling acidly in it for a moment, being like this. Maybe Eduardo’s right. Maybe they had been sweeping it under the rug, if this was waiting to show its face all along at the slightest hint of conflict -- but maybe that was fine, keeping it hidden, acting like they were okay long enough for it to become true. 

That’s how it should work, isn’t it? If they wedge themselves forcefully enough into the confines of this misshapen picture of reconciliation, then one day, finally, they’ll fit inside. 

“Come to bed,” Mark says, softer now, standing up. “When you feel like it.”

“Okay,” Eduardo says. His voice is a trembling little broken thing, and it occurs to Mark rather objectively that he’s hurt him.

He touches Eduardo on the shoulder, not in apology so much as to anchor them both to reality, and he tries to ignore the way Eduardo stiffens beneath the contact. 

_The truth hurts_ , he thinks as he pads back to the bedroom. _If it’s what stops us from making things any worse than they already are, then it’s a necessary evil._

He leaves the door cracked open to the silent hallway when he finally gets in bed and turns the light off, but Eduardo doesn’t come through it, predictably. Too soon, Mark’s asleep. 

 

iv. 

Eduardo’s curled up against Mark in the morning when they wake, half-spooned within the curve of his torso, their arms curled around each other and Mark breathing into his neck. It’s so comfortable, familiar, that Mark feels entirely bereaved when Eduardo pulls away like it was a mistake, sitting up, rubbing his eyes. He wants to tug him back down and pull him in and just go back to sleep like that, holding each other until everything is better again. 

He sips sourly at a cup of coffee while Eduardo showers, feeling emotionally hung over and unable to comprehend the fact that they’re about to go and do another day of it. He just wants to weather this, at this point, get through it so they can talk it out like adults when the business stuff is all accounted for, or -- or just do whatever, just have it be over.

They go through Eduardo freezing the account today, and Mark thinks despondently that “I had to get your attention” was never an excuse for a legitimately destructive lark of an action. But it’s Eduardo’s lawsuit, so it’s Eduardo’s story, and in Eduardo’s story it was all about Mark. 

They’re talking about the phone call, and Mark remembers how he’d been shaking, bodily, with anger at Eduardo and excitement about the angel investment and just adrenaline like it was all he had in his veins. He remembers the chlorine glow of the pool, yelling at Eduardo for a long time, a lot of pointless stuff which Eduardo is currently recounting, before coming around to “I’m willing to let bygones be bygones,” and he considers for a moment that that was a dick move. 

Then he wonders whether the dick move wasn’t ending it then, cutting him out the first moment he deserved it, a swift blow-out rather than the protracted death rattle that was the next few months -- rather than letting Eduardo sign the papers that would eventually do him in, though he barely knew it then himself, maybe wasn’t letting himself fully realize yet the plan he had agreed to with Thiel and Sean and everybody. 

He wonders if he could have just let Eduardo stay in New York, had it not been for that helplessly proud “Wardo? We did it,” that fireworks feeling again that he had made it, he’d done it, and he wanted his best friend with him for that. 

He could have broken it off and saved them all the trouble, could have ended it in the summer the same way it went on to end in the winter. Would that have made more sense to Eduardo? Would it have cut marginally more shallowly than the set-up?

And then Mark realizes that he’s just thought, for the first time, that he lost Eduardo in the end, rather than only temporarily. 

Eduardo’s still talking through it, and it hurts so much to hear all over again. Eduardo came back once and it was his undoing, and he’s come back again now and Mark can see the regret and self-loathing etched all over his face like he’s dripping in it. It’s terrible to realize. Once upon a time, losing Eduardo had been the single worst mistake of Mark’s entire life. Not that he didn’t need to get gone from Facebook -- and Mark can already tell that point isn’t going to get pressed here, and it makes him so angry he feels like he’s imploding -- but the consequence Mark hadn’t really anticipated, Eduardo getting gone from his life. It had just seemed -- wrong, then, that he shouldn’t have Eduardo anymore, Eduardo, who was always there, and he’d been an idiot not to expect it. 

But he’d fixed it. He’d gotten him back and they’d buried the mistake beneath layers of history and new layers, things they managed together, things that had been starting to resemble forgiveness. They lived like there would be time enough to come to terms with the past and that it wasn’t worth sacrificing the present for, together. And now hashing it all out again for all these stupid nothing reasons is rendering that mistake back into all its former horror a thousand times over. 

Regret bubbles sick and hot in Mark’s stomach, and he listens to Eduardo finally getting around to “I need my CFO” with that numb, dead look on his face, and for one horrible moment he actually feels like he’s going to cry. 

The truth is, he needs Eduardo by his side. He needs him there to take all the worst parts of himself and turn them into something he can live with, to remind him of how he fucked up but then how he made it better, how they were stupid and they beat it, in the end. 

He needs him there because he loves him, even though his sight is short sometimes, even though he feels too much and misses the forest for the trees and oftentimes the trees for Mark. 

He wants to be doted on and to feel like all his little idiosyncrasies are good for someone, that he is good. 

He finds Eduardo to be quietly, unexpectedly beautiful, and fascinating, and unlike anyone else he’s ever met. He loves his body and to try to read all the subtleties of his face. 

He loves him for coming back and for staying and for loving Mark. 

He does not want, nor did he ever expect, this to end.

“I told him I’d be there,” Eduardo says. He looks so tired. There’s a little bruise from Mark’s teeth beneath his ear, just visible inside his collar, like a secret. Mark wishes he hadn’t noticed it. A moment later, Eduardo shifts and it’s out of sight. 

They move on, then, to the contents of the new contracts, new shares, new apportioning, and it’s a blessing to be able to tune out for a moment, to give his mind a rest. After a while there’s a pause, silence, and he slides back into focus. 

“Eduardo?” the blonde lawyer is saying. Eduardo has his back turned in his chair, staring out the window at the gathering dusk. 

After a moment he turns, and Mark isn’t ready for the way his face looks, grey, his eyes dark and wet, shoulders slumped with heartache. 

“Could you please repeat the question,” he says. 

“No, it was an outrageously leading question the first time, and now you want us to hear it again?” Sy says, but Mark hadn’t heard the question, and he can’t stop looking at Eduardo’s face.

“Yes,” Gretchen says, gently, “would you read it back, please.”

“Counsel: ‘And when you signed these documents, were you aware that you were signing your own death certificate?’” the stenographer reads robotically. 

“No,” Eduardo says, his voice a dull monotone. It sounds like he has a head cold. “It was insanely stupid of me not to have my own laywers look over all the -- in, in all honesty, I thought they were my lawyers.” There’s a warped, deadened kind of humor in his voice, rueful, waterlogged with regret. 

He turns to look at Mark, sideways in his chair.

“I was your only friend.”

Mark stares into his eyes, face set, and he knows what this means. 

“You had one friend,” Eduardo says, the last two words falling like punctuation marks, and Mark hears what he’s actually saying: _I loved you._

_How could you?_

“My father won’t even look at me,” Eduardo mutters, sounding worse than on the verge of tears, sounding beyond tears, beyond feeling, as he looks down at the floor. Mark can see Marylin out of the corner of his eye, glancing at him from down the table, and he doesn’t say anything. It’s true Eduardo’s father hasn’t spoken to him since it happened, even with the new job in California, even with everything. And Mark did that. Mark loves Eduardo, loved him then and loves him still, and he is at least partially culpable for the look that’s on Eduardo’s face right now. 

“Okay, Eduardo,” Gretchen prompts, almost apologetically, “did Mr. Zuckerberg say anything to you after you signed the papers?” The room feels airless.

“There was a lot of handshaking, a lot of congratulations,” Eduardo says in that same numb voice. “He’d already told me he wouldn’t be coming back to school for at least a semester, so we were saying goodbye for a while,” and his voice catches slightly at the end. 

“And then before I left, he said, ‘but you’ve gotta come back.’” The words come out a little derisive, a little mocking, but Mark remembers them in his own voice -- remembers looking up at Eduardo in the new offices, remembers trying not to think about it. Eduardo doesn’t even bring up the worst part: “Remember the algorithm on the window at Kirkland?” he’d said, oblivious, and Mark had had to tamp down a great number of painful emotions within the space of a moment: disdain that Eduardo thinks that has anything to do with anything, that Eduardo always thought this was about the wrong things, and regret, as awful a regret as he felt later, when Sean was saying, “That’s life in the NFL.” Regret that things had to be this way, that they couldn’t be different. That he was about to do what he was about to do to Eduardo. 

Eduardo tells them now about the email in November, after the stunt with Case. “I didn’t know whether to dress for the party or the business meeting, so I kind of dressed for both,” he says, a humorless twist to his voice. “But it didn’t matter.”

“Why not?” Gretchen asks.

“Because I wasn’t called out there for either one.”

“What were you called out there for?”

Eduardo looks at Mark again, straight across the table, his face half-crumpled. “An ambush,” he says, voice thick and wet. Mark looks away. 

He remembers it now, as fresh as if it were yesterday, the sound of the laptop smashing on his desk, the shock and horror like he’d been shot in the chest, staring up at Eduardo _screaming_ at Sean, realizing that this was the inevitable end. Eduardo asking about the Phoenix. Eduardo talking about the chicken. Mark had wanted to hit him, to stand up and grab him by the lapels and scream right back in his face, _You fucking brought this on yourself._

“...And what was your ownership share diluted down to?” Gretchen says finally, after a long, needlingly indulgent train of questions. 

“Point zero-three-percent,” Eduardo says. Each staccato syllable falls and dissipates like a drop of water, and Mark can feel his own heart thudding sluggishly forward with them, like a reminder: _you did this to him, and you have to live with it_. 

Gretchen turns to Sy, spreading her hands. Mark looks away from Eduardo’s face. _It’s over,_ he thinks absently, and he’s not sure what he’s referring to. 

They’re thanked for their time, and told they’ll get next steps back within a couple of days. Eduardo gets up and walks out the door without saying anything to Mark. Mark watches him go through the glass, then gets up when he’s stopped by the elevators.

He catches up with him right as the door opens with a ding and shoves his hand into it to hold it open and stop Eduardo from getting in. He looks him in the eye. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, very clearly. Eduardo closes his eyes, shaking his head. Then he looks up.

“Did you know?” he asks, voice constricted. “When you told me to come back, when -- after I signed the new contracts. Did you know then?”

Mark can’t look at him. “Yes.” The confession falls from his lips with barely any sound to it. Eduardo doesn’t react, which Mark takes as indication that this is the answer he expected. There doesn’t seem to be any point in covering up the truth anymore; Eduardo is taking away what he wants to hear, and what he wants to hear is that this was all Mark’s fault. In ways -- by no means every way, but some -- it was.

“Wardo,” he says, almost a whisper, “I--”

Eduardo takes his hand then, compulsively, and whatever Mark was about to say dies in his throat. He can’t help but remember Erica in the Thirsty Scholar right before she’d told him he was an asshole and walked out of his life, and it scares him so much. 

“Can you,” Eduardo says, stilted, after a moment. “Can I have some time.” 

“Okay,” Mark says. “I have work I wanted to get done anyway. I can -- hang out here.” 

“I’ll take a cab if you want to take my car,” Eduardo says in a monotone, brow pinching, like he doesn’t want to be nice to Mark but he can’t help it. 

“It’s okay,” Mark says. Eduardo lets go of his hand.

Eduardo nods, then gets into the elevator, not looking up. Mark doesn’t make an effort to kiss him or say goodbye as the doors slide shut. 

Mark opens his laptop at the conference table, empty now, sets his fingers on the keys and starts working on autopilot, answering emails, checking wireframes and snippets of code, feeling like he’s not using any of his brain. The day is ringing dully in his ears, Eduardo’s wrecked face -- torn apart like tissue, an open wound -- burned into his retinas.

After a couple of hours, he snaps out of it suddenly -- is just thinking, _what am I doing here?_ when the door clicks open. It’s Marylin. He shuts his laptop and stands up as soon as he sees her.

“How are things?” she asks tentatively. He laughs coldly.

“I’d blame this all on you,” he says, narrowing his eyes at her, “but I think it would be too easy.” 

“Bad, then,” she ventures after a moment, and she looks so genuinely sorry that his shoulders slump, defeated. 

“Just brought to light a lot of stuff that was there and we just weren’t talking about it,” he says, low, shrugging. She nods, pursing her lips. 

“I’m sure it’ll be okay.” 

“Yeah,” Mark says, and then again, “yeah,” like maybe if he can hear it enough times it’ll become true. 

“So what happens now?” he asks.

“Sy and the others are having a steak on University Avenue,” she says. “Then they’ll come back up to the office and start working on a settlement agreement to present to you.”

He nods slowly, looking at the floor. “Happy ending.” 

“Right.” She bites her lip, peering at him. “You did the right thing, Mark,” she adds softly. 

“I have to go home,” Mark says, glancing at her and swallowing, “I have to go home now. I -- appreciate your help with all this.”

Her eyes go soft, a sad little twist to her mouth, and he thinks she might be about to say something else and he doesn’t want to hear it, so he walks out. 

The street is dark when he gets out of the cab, and he thinks back to Eduardo dripping and tired and angry in the living room of the first house near Stanford, dropping his bag on the floor. He slides his key into the lock and pushes the door open. The house is quiet, no sign of Eduardo anywhere, but his keys are on the side table and the car is out front, so he must be here. 

He wanders through the living room. There are photos missing from the mantlepiece, which was mostly Eduardo’s creation anyway, and from the wall next to it. Mark is too tired to try to understand why. He goes upstairs. 

The bedroom is dark when he steps over the threshold, and he can see Eduardo’s shadowed form lying like a statue on the bed, above the sheets in his slacks and dress shirt and socks. He presents such a delicate little picture that Mark has to pause for a moment and try to take a snapshot. But the light shifts, and the shadows melt together in the curves and depressions of Eduardo’s body, and the picture is gone as suddenly as it came. 

Mark sits next to him on the bed, the weight on the mattress causing Eduardo’s body to sink, slightly. He’s got his hands folded together by his face, and he’s staring straight ahead.

“Wardo?” Mark says when Eduardo doesn’t move or speak. He reaches for him, extends a hand toward his thin wrist in the dark, and Eduardo draws away and in on himself like a distrustful creature retreating into the hollows of its shell. 

That’s when Mark sees the suitcases in front of the bedside table. 

“I’ve been thinking,” Eduardo says into the dark, voice low but clear, his eyes not moving, “about -- everything, and. And whether I should be here.” 

The bottom has dropped out of Mark’s stomach.

“I deserve... better,” Eduardo whispers, like he’s discovering the words as he speaks them. “Coming back to you after what you -- after what happened, and I sit here every day with you wondering how I could respect myself that little that I would do that.”

“No you don’t,” Mark says. His chest feels tight, stricken, like Eduardo has forced his way inside and grabbed his heart and is squeezing the life out of it slowly.

Eduardo sits up, cross-legged and hunched on the bed, keeping his distance as he looks into Mark’s eyes briefly before turning away again. “Have you ever once thought of what I look like in all of this?” Mark remembers Marylin saying _he comes out of this looking like he can do business like an adult, not just bend over_ , and his chest constricts even further.“Have you ever -- did you ever once stop to think that you, that you lost the right to have me when you treated me as though I was expendable?”

Mark is speechless.

“That you lost the right to _us_ when you acted as though you could do anything, and I would just stay,” Eduardo whispers, voice tight and airless. “Because I did stay. And -- I don’t know why.” 

“Why did you come back,” Mark says hollowly, “why come back at all, if you just...” he can’t finish the sentence.

“I've been in love with you since my sophomore year, Mark,” Eduardo says, like he can’t believe Mark doesn’t get that it’s the answer. They’re such nice words and Mark can’t believe how much they hurt. 

“But if you weren't going to be happy.”

Eduardo huffs out a mirthless laugh. “You know I've always prioritized you over my own happiness.”

Mark shakes his head. “That's fucked up, Wardo.”

“Yeah,” Eduardo says quietly. “I know.”

“We were better,” Mark murmurs, disbelief still clouding his mind, as though this isn’t real, as though he’ll wake up any moment and he’ll turn out to be in this bed beside Eduardo and it will have been a dream. “Before this, I thought, I thought you understood that I -- that I didn’t want to hurt you, that I didn’t think --”

“But that’s the problem, isn’t it,” Eduardo says in monotone. His eyes are wet, dark enough that they seem to blend in to the low, soft grey of the room, and neither of them speaks for a long time. 

“It was business, Wardo,” Mark says finally, trembling with effort. “This is -- you and I aren’t --” but he doesn’t know how to say it. He never has. 

Eduardo looks at him finally, stock still. When he speaks, his voice is low and carrying, filling Mark’s ears, not leaving room for anything else. 

“If you love me,” Eduardo says, “you’ll let me leave you.”

“It’s not like I’m keeping you here against your will,” Mark says, goaded into incredulity for a second by the absurd melodrama of what Eduardo’s saying, by the way it was always like this for him, all about them and never about the whole truth. Eduardo just stares at him, and Mark takes a breath. “Look,” he says, trying to stay calm, “You -- we chose this, Wardo, we said that the past is in the past, and that...” he flounders, hopelessly frustrated by the limitations of the words, “that _this_ is more important than, than anything.” He gestures between them. “Please,” he adds on a slight shudder, the word leaving him like it’s being physically pulled from his lungs. 

He reaches for Eduardo again, and this time Eduardo lets him take his hand. He doesn’t move beneath Mark’s touch, and it’s a million times worse than when he’d pulled away. It feels like he’s already gone. 

“I don’t want to spend my life --” he wets his lips, “I mean, _struggling_ to get over it. I want -- to be worth more than that.”

“You’re worth everything to me,” Mark says with such force it surprises him.

Eduardo looks up at him, and when Mark sees the look in his eyes he knows, suddenly, so cold it feels as though it stops his heart, that it’s over. 

“But I’m not,” he says, with a terrible, joyless little twist to his mouth. It fades quickly, and then he’s just looking at Mark, as though he’s having trouble stopping. 

“Tell me you want me to fight you on this and I will,” Mark says. 

Eduardo looks away. 

“You don’t even know what you want,” Mark says quietly. He knows he shouldn’t, but he feels as though Eduardo has just calmly taken a knife and silently pierced his stomach with it and dragged it slowly up and up until it sliced his heart in two. 

“No,” Eduardo says. “I do now.” There’s a muscle jumping in his jaw, and he squeezes his eyes shut suddenly, shoulders quivering. Mark watches it happen. He thinks he left his own body at some point very recently, standing here and gazing impartially on this conversation like it’s a scene in a television drama he’s settled on momentarily while flipping through the channels. 

Eduardo unfolds his legs and swings them over the side of the bed. He brushes against Mark as he does it, and Mark grabs his wrist and leans forward and kisses him, hard and close-mouthed, an act of desperation. It’s a pitiful last-ditch plea and he knows it and he thinks Eduardo must too, but when Eduardo pulls away his cheeks are wet, and he swipes his thumb over the back of Mark’s hand as he stands and finally withdraws from the contact. 

“I do love you.” His voice is trembling only slightly. “But this is no good for me.” 

“Where are you going to go?” Mark’s voice is flat. He can barely see Eduardo’s face now, enfolded in shadow. 

“I put some of my things in the car already,” he says, not answering the question. The pictures from the living room. Mark’s throat is choking tight. “I’ll -- be in touch, about the rest.” 

“The settlement,” Mark says, just to say anything. “We’ll have to sign something.”

“I guess so,” Eduardo says. “So -- I’ll see you, then.”

Mark stares at him, open-mouthed. 

It’s an afterthought, it seems, but Eduardo dithers for a moment, shifting on the balls of his feet, and then he steps forward and leans in and kisses Mark on the cheek. Mark feels his eyelashes on his skin as he pulls back, light as a whisper, and he closes his eyes for a moment, holding the feeling of that touch in his mind like it’s the last true thing he’ll ever know. 

Eduardo picks up a suitcase in each hand.

“Do you need a hand,” Mark says tonelessly.

Eduardo looks at him, face twisting. “I’ve got it,” he says, and then he turns and walks out. Mark doesn’t run after him, doesn’t call his name. He hears, very distantly, the closing of the front door and the sudden rumble of the engine starting on Eduardo’s car and then the noise all receding, and the deafening silence that follows.


End file.
